Hunger Makes People Work Harder, and Other Stupid Things We Used to Believe About Poverty

A history of how we came to change our minds.

There is no better way to channel the mind-bending logic of 18th century thinkers on poverty (men who we can assume were not poor themselves, by virtue of the fact that history remembers them) than to simply quote their words. Meet Philippe Hecquet, a well-known French doctor speaking in 1740:

The poor ... are like the shadows in a painting: they provide the necessary contrast.

With a little less lyricism, here is Englishman Arthur Young, in 1771:

Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious.

Philosopher and economist Bernard de Mandeville explained in 1732 that if countries can't have slaves, the rich people who live there at least require a vast and permanent underclass to prop up the economy and their personal good times:

... it is manifest, that in a free Nation where Slaves are not allow'd of, the surest Wealth consists in a Multitude of laborious Poor; for besides that they are the never-failing Nursery of Fleets and Armies, without them there could be no Enjoyment, and no Product of any Country could be valuable.

In the span of 200 years, these commonly held sentiments have of course come to be seen as deeply wrong-headed, in total opposition with today's notion that poverty is something we'd rather eradicate than exploit. The history of how we so dramatically changed our minds on the topic (and the related responsibilities of government) is chronicled in a fascinating new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Georgetown University economist Martin Ravallion.

Most fundamentally, as Ravallion writes, we've gone from thinking that poverty is a necessary ingredient for economic development to thinking that poverty constrains it. Numerous related assumptions have (mostly) fallen along the way: The poor were at fault for their own poverty (through moral weakness, alcoholism, laziness, a penchant for making too many babies). The poor were born that way, and nothing could be done about it. Besides, poverty had its own utility: If people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Thus, poverty was a social good.

Today, we mostly agree on three ideas that Ravallion illustrates form a startlingly recent consensus: Poverty is bad, it's possible to do something about it, and government policy can play a role. That last part doesn't just mean propping up the floor beneath poor people so they don't become totally destitute. It means helping people out of poverty all together.

So how did we get here? As recently as 1820, researchers have calculated that 84 percent of the world's population lived in "extreme poverty" (on less than the 1985 equivalent of a U.S. dollar a day). Around this time in Europe, the prevailing economic thought was that if you paid people more, you'd actually motivate them less, and their output would fall. You may recognize this logic as the exact opposite of what we generally think today (big earners are hard workers).

"The basis for this idea appears to have been little more than casual anecdotes," Ravallion writes. You know: stories of men rushing to the saloon with their paychecks. "It was not the last time in the history of thought about poverty that casual incentive arguments resting on little or no good evidence would buttress strong policy positions."

Since then, as the nature of work and technology have changed, a number of ideas have also evolved in how we think about the poor and poverty itself. During what Ravaillion calls the First Poverty Enlightenment, around the turn of the 19th century, he traces a newfound respect for poor people as actual people – not as shadows on a painting, or as laborers working to someone else's end. If all people were equal, poor people were no less worthy of rights than the rich. And poverty began to seem less like an inevitability.

Prior to this time, school was thought to be a waste of time for poor children, who should have been working instead. But the rise of new kinds of jobs with the Industrial Revolution demanded more education. And the rise of social science research began to document for the first time the breadth of poverty, revealing to the non-poor how the poor really lived. Later events like the Great Depression would ultimately make clear that structural economic and social problems contributed to poverty more than moral weakness and bar tabs.

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Ravillion identifies a Second Poverty Enlightenment in the second half of the 20th century, when we came to think of poverty as morally unacceptable, particularly in countries that were supposed to be "rich." Concern over poverty rose, as global poverty rates fell. Ravillion documents this first trend with a timeline of references to poverty in Google Books (with each year normalized by the total quantity of content):

This whole story suggests that we've come a very long way in two centuries from a time when we didn't even conceive of poverty as a problem. But it's also possible to see in this summer's Congressional debates over food stamps echoes some of these same outdated ideas – that aiding the poor will only discourage them from working, or that doing so is simply not the government's job. "The difference today," Ravillion writes, "is that most people in the world clearly do not agree."

About the Author

Emily Badger is a former staff writer at CityLab. Her work has previously appeared in Pacific Standard, GOOD, The Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

In southwest Connecticut, the gap between rich and poor is wider than anywhere else in the country. Invisible walls created by local zoning boards and the state government block affordable housing and, by extension, the people who need it.